One-time top Mafia fugitive Matteo
Messina Denaro, caught after 30 years on the run in a Palermo
cancer clinic in mid-January, is now in an irreversible coma,
sources at L'Aquila hospital said Friday.
Denaro, 61, hospitalised in the prison ward of L'Aquila
hospital, won't come out of the coma and this evening the
doctors will suspend his nutrition, they said.
Messina Denaro had been in hospital for over a month.
The intestinal surgery he underwent on August 8 was successful
but the mobster's advanced colon cancer caused an irreversible
deterioration in his state of health, the sources said.
The Cosa Nostra superboss has been convicted for his involvement
in dozens of murders, including the 1992 bombings that killed
anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he has
been condemned for the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the
12-year-old son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was
strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and
religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10
people and hurt 40 more in 1993.
Long idolised by younger mafiosi for his ruthlessness and
playboy-like charisma,, Messina Denaro sealed a reputation for
brutality by murdering a rival Trapani boss and strangling his
three-months-pregnant girlfriend.
The boss, who reportedly enjoyed orgies with Palermo women while
on the run, once said he could have filled a cemetery with those
he had killed.
He was reportedly helped dodge police by a "middle class Mafia",
not only around his fief at Trapani but also around Sicily,
Italian police have said.
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